Now is time for cake



After the success of my most recent foray into cake-making, I decided to purchase the e-book from which that recipe came, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. The way I see it, it doesn't hurt to have an entire baked-goodies cookbook which makes a point of avoiding dairy. I don't currently have all the supplies I need for a true foray into cupcake-making, but I do have the basics for cake-making.

Mom's birthday, this past Thursday, seemed the perfect excuse reason to try out a recipe or two from the book.

I'd heard so many good things about Red Velvet Cake and was hoping its allure was less about its often-vibrant colouring and more about the balance of flavours involved. I decided to try my hand at adapting a dairy-free version.

In the end, extracting natural food colouring from beets or raspberries was a bit too intimidating at this early stage in my development as a baker, so I opted to do a simpler "Velvet Cake", omitting any extra colouring — thus using the exact same recipe I paired with the raspberry buttercream last time — and going with the vegan cookbook's cream cheese icing.

I doubled the cake batter to fill two cake pans and also doubled the icing recipe to be certain to make enough to frost a cake.

The cake, as a whole, was the best damn cake I've ever eaten in my life. The icing didn't overpower the chocolate cake (although I would have liked a bit more cream cheese "tang" to the finished product) and wasn't too sweet, 'though certainly sweet enough. The cake itself was unbelievably moist without being dense. It was fantastic!